Lilac at Forty Four
“Lilac at Forty Four” is a photographic cycle of 20 images created in my studio at number 44 on a historic street in Łódź, Poland. At the emotional center of the series is the lilac, received as a gift from someone important: a symbol of spring and blooming, but also of loss and separation.
Around this moment, the studio, together with the objects within it, becomes an intimate emotional setting. Yet the world filters in through the windows, never fully breaking through. In the tension between inner and outer space, the sense of perception is unsettled.
Times become confused: past, present, future – they fall out of sequence. The same views come back again and again. Repetition feels almost like prayer – an insistent circling around the same motifs and frames, shaped by a longing for presence. What remains is a quiet archive of a moment.
Marcela Paniak is a Polish photographer working with photographic archives. She holds a PhD in art and graduated in Photography from the Film School in Lodz, where she teaches archival photography. She is a co-founder of the Viva Archiva! Foundation, dedicated to creative uses of photographic and film archives. In her photographic work, she explores memory, identity, history, absence, and photography itself. She was awarded a scholarship from the Minister of Science and Higher Education and was nominated in connection with the international photography festival Les Rencontres d’Arles.
